


scaffolding

by Previously8



Category: The Tarot Sequence - K.D. Edwards
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Matthias "Max" Saint Valentine's Childhood, Post-TLS Epilogue, Pre-Quinn/Max, Quinn Saint Nicholas is a Good Friend, my sons are hurt but they talk to each other so it's okay, or at least mentions of it so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25889350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Previously8/pseuds/Previously8
Summary: Nine feet across is just enough for three strides and a turn. It doesn’t fulfill Max’s desperate need to pace whenever he can’t sleep.Or, it's nighttime at the Half House, Max isn't sleeping, and there's an unexpected guest in the kitchen.
Relationships: Quinn Saint Nicholas & Matthias "Max" Saint Valentine
Comments: 15
Kudos: 25





	scaffolding

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a love letter to Half House, re:the milk crate cupboards and the wrench as a handle to the air conditioning, nine feet across and three floors and everything about it! instead, it turned into the less-angsty cousin of the max & quinn fic I was planning to post-- the working title for this one was "hot chocolate" :D 
> 
> many thanks to orby on the discord for reading through & helping me find places to fix up! 
> 
> Warnings: mentions of Max's childhood/teenagerhood including allusions to sexual and physical abuse, Max's negative self-talk, Quinn's meds, and one near panic attack

The Half House is different than any other place that Max has stayed. 

It’s a lot smaller, for one: three floors, but only nine feet across at its widest. There is none of the grandeur of the Lovers’ estate. What he remembers of a childhood house is sweeping staircases and gilded gold on every edge, the gaping vastness of empty ballrooms during the day and brocaded drapes shielding windows from prying eyes. Most of his memories of an estate childhood are hazy, long since written over by less pleasant ones, but he remembers tucking himself behind velvet curtains to avoid passing servants and staring up at the luminescent face of his grandmother in portrait.

Here, the hallways are narrow, cramped, and passing someone in the hall requires pasting himself against the faded wallpaper to avoid touching them. There are no windows in these halls either, much less gold-framed ones, just dim electric lights, most of them missing one bulb or both. 

Nine feet across is just enough for three strides and a turn. It doesn’t fulfill Max’s desperate need to pace whenever he can’t sleep.

Despite all the reasons he really, _really_ shouldn’t be wandering around a house that’s not his, Max has taken to leaving the guest room at night. Something about climbing the stairs at night makes him feel less claustrophobic, almost meditative. He has nothing to fear from the darkness, so he doesn’t turn the lamps on as he pads up and down the narrow steps. The banister under his hand is smooth with age, the carpet threadbare on every step and landing. Max takes comfort in the fact that he is not intruding, he is not the first to walk here—far from it. 

He figures out quickly enough during his tentative explorations that there are only a room or two on each floor. The uppermost one has the sanctum, which he doesn’t peek at—sigil magic has never been something he was good enough at, and even looking at the landing puts a sour taste in his mouth. His cheek aches from a long-remembered slap. Across from the small sanctum, facing the street, is Rune’s room. Its door is always closed at night, but Max pauses in front of it anyway, careful not to step on the loose floorboard. 

He doesn’t know what he’s hoping for. He bites his lip and moves on. 

He is very good at walking silently down stairs. He has been practicing since he left the Lovers’ estate. There were many years when he wasn’t allowed to wander and he wonders if that’s why he feels so jumpy now, if he’s just remembering the sting of—no. No dreams, no memories, not tonight. He’s in a new house. It’s nothing like any place he’s stayed before, and that’s a _good_ thing. 

On his way down tonight, he skips the second floor—that’s where the guest room is, where his meager possessions are being stored for now. It’s not _his_ room, no matter what Rune and Brand say. He knows better than to think he has a place here for long. 

Home, Max has often thought, doesn’t actually exist. Home is a made-up concept to make people get attached to the stupid fragile roof above their heads. People who rely on something as impermanent as a _place_ are only destined to be disappointed. Homes are destroyed every day—by earthquakes and hurricanes and arsonists and termites and so many less-concrete things. There’s no use, at least not for someone like Max, unmoored and directionless, hunted and haunted, to feel attached to walls that will crumble like a stale cookie, left to be licked clean by vermin. 

He has never had a home. He tells himself he does not want one. 

There is one creaky step between the first and the second floor. On it, the worn, once-green rug is less-scuffed than on any of the others. Max has watched carefully, with the eyes of someone used to tracking people’s movements, so he knows that Rune and Brand always skip it. He does the same, now, landing on the second lowest step with barely more than a quiet thump. It’s more noise than he should have made. He crouches, waiting.

He looks around. From here, Max can see into the kitchen, with its stacked-milk crate shelves, cupboards without handles, yellowed and peeling wallpaper. The small living room is mostly obscured, just the dusty carpet and the edge of a coffee table visible from this angle. He can also see the front door, if he cranes his neck. It’s latched shut, all three locks firmly in place and a swatch of duct tape over the peep hole. 

That reassures him for reasons he’s trying not to think about tonight. He exhales a soft breath. 

“Max?” A small voice calls. “That’s you, right?” A small sandy-haired head pops into view around the kitchen doorframe. 

Max doesn’t jump—those instincts are well worn out of him—but he does freeze. His pulse is racing a mile a minute, blood rushing in his ears, and goosebumps have raised themselves on his arms. He can feel a trickle of cold sweat down his neck. It doesn’t matter that he knows Quinn Saint Nicholas, that Quinn is very slight and several inches shorter than him, nor that Quinn is trusted in the house during the day—Max’s stupid, broken brain still thinks, _threat_. The surprise is enough to unbalance whatever calm Max has been searching for tonight. There is a memory, clawing at the fragile dam he’s been building, trying to leak through to the present. He can feel his breaths hissing between his teeth, coming too short. There is a collar—

An ice cube is shoved into his hand. Max blinks, shocked by the sudden cold. The memory slinks away into the place his brain retreats to find nightmare material.

Quinn is framed by the bars supporting the banister. His cold fingers are wrapped around Max’s, so that his hand curls over the chip of ice he’s placed there. His eyes are wide, luminous and he’s closer than would normally be comfortable, peering at Max with concern. 

He whispers, “that works, most of the time. You’re back now, right?”

“Back?” Max manages. His throat feels painfully dry. “I didn’t go anywhere.” 

He’s pretty sure it’s not the least bit convincing. Quinn just looks at him for a moment, with a strange, unusually focused gaze. Max wasn’t even aware Quinn could look focused, with how much time he seems to spend with his head in the clouds or the future or whatever. It’s eerie—but it gives Max something to concentrate on besides the melting ice cube in his hand, dripping water onto the carpet. 

“Sorry for surprising you,” Quinn says quietly, instead of replying. He uncurls his fingers from Max’s, and backs away, towards the kitchen. He beckons with one hand, indicating that Max should follow. 

It takes a minute for Max to regain control of his legs. They still shake a little, as he stands up and steps down the last two stairs. It’s humiliating to be so weak, and Max is glad that Quinn has disappeared into the kitchen, so he doesn’t have to witness the tremors in Max’s hands. He clenches them into fists and hates his brain a little bit more. Shame burns the tips of his ears, but each step towards the kitchen is a little bit easier. Quinn, standing on his toes, flicks the light over the stove on. It hums and casts the room in a small orange glow. 

“You usually like hot chocolate,” Quinn says brightly when Max steps into the kitchen. He pulls a steaming mug from the microwave and sets it down on the table. It smells sweet. 

Max stares at it, hands still clenched into tight fists at his sides. He doesn’t understand the way Quinn works—not his weird prophet-y stuff and not whatever makes him think it’s a good idea to make hot chocolate out of ingredients that don’t even belong to him. It makes Max’s skin itch to think about taking anything from the kitchen that he doesn’t have permission to have. He’s not yet used to asking for second helpings, much less midnight snacks. 

“You couldn’t have made coffee?” The coffee machine is spotless like few other things in the kitchen. He’s been allowed to ask for as many cups of it as he wants, when Rune is home.

Quinn looks at the coffee machine and makes a face. “I could, but most of the time when I made any before four in the morning, Brand came in and was angry. It’s his machine, did you know?”

Max didn’t know and doesn’t really care. “No,” he says.

Quinn sits at the narrow table, so Max does too. He takes a tentative sip of the hot chocolate. It’s surprisingly good—rich and creamy, probably made from a package but with milk rather than water. He doesn’t remember the last time he had hot chocolate. Quinn grins when he takes another sip.

He downs half the mug. He hates to know that he’ll pin the petty theft on Quinn if he needs to. 

Between sips, he watches Quinn. He looks tired, too. His fingers jitter along the tabletop like agitated spider legs, and his eyes keep flicking up to the main kitchen light, over to the door, back over to the clock on the stove, and down to Max. It strikes Max, embarrassingly late, that it’s weird that he’s here, in Half House, when he’s supposed to be halfway across the city at his brother’s place. Max doesn’t entirely understand, or know, the details of why Quinn is staying there, but he knows that Rune and Addam have been trying to keep an eye on him. Something to do with his seer powers. Something that makes Rune watch him carefully, like maybe Quinn is a bomb waiting to go off, just like Max.

“Why are you even here?” he asks. 

Quinn’s eyes stop wandering and set on him. “It felt important.” His fingers drum, staccato, on the scuffed wood of the table. “And I wanted to. We’re going to be friends, you know.”

“Except when we’re not,” Max points out. 

He nods. “Except when we weren’t.” 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be seeing things, anymore,” Max says, before he can think that it’s probably rude. He can feel his ears warm, too pale to hide the blush. 

Quinn’s smile fades. “I am.” He puts a small green pill bottle on the table. Tablets rattle loosely on the inside. “They mostly work. But I still remember what I saw before I started taking them.” 

Max doesn’t ask what “mostly” means. He takes another sip of his hot chocolate, gut clenching in guilt. It’s just like him to ask all the wrong questions. He wonders how many more stupid things he can say before he and Quinn are irreversibly not-friends. 

Outside, crickets hum and traffic passes somewhere in the distance. Here, at the kitchen table, there are only Quinn’s quick breaths, the tapping of his fingers and the off-key hum of the stove light. For the first time tonight, Max is starting to actually feel tired. All of the nightmares that lurk, buzzing under his skin, the letters that he’s keeping hidden, the fear that has been dogging his every step no matter how impressive Rune and Brand are—somehow, the cozy kitchen, the creamy hot chocolate, Quinn’s steady jumpiness have washed it away, for now. 

It’s still not worth it to dream that this house could be permanent. 

No matter what Rune has been promising or what Max wants, he has always known that it is just a matter of time before they tell him to get out of their way, out of their sight. As long as he’s useless, there’s no reason for him to stay, and now that he’s a liability… Well, the only thing worse than leaving, he knows, is being kept too close. Being a pet, a thing to be treasured and fawned over while the lights are on him and discarded when he isn’t what they’re looking for anymore—he knows what _that_ is like, and he’s grateful it doesn’t seem to be in the cards here. Leaving is inevitable. It hurts, somewhere in his chest, to dream that this place could be permanent in a _good_ way. 

Quinn speaks, suddenly. “I didn’t break in, you know.”

“What?” 

“To the house,” Quinn says, gesturing vaguely at the room they’re in. “Queenie let me in. She always watches her telenovelas on Tuesdays after eleven, so I didn’t even wake her up. And I didn’t have to see anything to know that.” Max nods, not sure what the right answer is to Quinn’s random exposition. Quinn’s gaze goes a little distant, over Max’s shoulder. “Queenie is surprisingly constant, you know. She was always the way she will be.” 

Quinn is often unsettling, in that the things he says sound either _wrong_ or _too right_. Max has thought more than once that Quinn is creepy, because his verb tenses are wrong, because he calls people’s phones before things happen and afterwards, because he’s vague and hypothetical and qualifies things with “most of the time” and “once” and “sometimes”. Max didn’t think it was possible for him to be more unsettling than he already was, but Quinn being _certain_ about something sends a shiver down his spine. There’s no way to forget he’s a prophet when he speaks in absolutes. 

He shakes it off. “And?”

Quinn’s gaze refocuses. “Not the point,” he agrees. 

He looks nervous again, shifting and playing with his long sleeves. His nails are bitten down to nubs, skin cracked and peeling around them. The shirt he’s wearing is too big on him, slipping off his shoulders and hanging down around his fingers. There’s some old band that Max doesn’t know on the front.

“I don’t know when I’m supposed to say things, anymore.” Quinn has moved on from pulling on loose threads to tracing aimless circles on the tabletop. “That’s what my meds are really good at. They make the details all fuzzy.” He looks up. “But I was going to tell you, once.”

“Tell me what?”

“Even when we’re enemies,” he says seriously, eyes unerringly focused on Max, “you always have a home here. Home is people.”

It feels like there’s something lodged high in Max’s throat. 

“Oh,” he manages. 

You don’t ignore prophets, unless you’re stupid, and Max knows he’s not that. Still—A home, here? Hadn’t he just been telling himself that permanence was too much to ask? That houses were meant to crumble and him with them, again and again; that being asked to leave was inevitable? There’s no place that can contain his own personal hurricane of misfortune, the same one that’s been following him like a shadow for ten years. He’s been so careful not to think about getting too attached to the house, though he can now see that he failed at that, too—He knows about the creaky stairs and the chipped paint and the fact that the microwave is always five minutes ahead no matter how many times they reset it. He’s walked every inch of the house, traced every doorframe, memorized each fault too well not to be at least a little bit attached. He could pretend it was so that he’d know how to leave, but it has also taught him how to stay. It hasn’t made it his _home_ , though.

Quinn has answered a question that Max didn’t really want to ask: If home isn’t these four walls, this old kitchen, the ripped screen door and the stained counters, what is it?

 _Home is people._

Rune, Brand. Quinn. It’s easy to imagine them becoming permanent, and that makes it all the more terrifying. He’s been trying so hard not to want it, but it’s easy to see that he’s part of them, that they’re part of him—Houses can only be loved, but people can love you back. If the past few weeks have taught him anything, it’s probably that. He’s been walking these halls for nights, getting ready to leave the _place_ , all while forgetting about the _people_. It’s an unexpected cruelty, and his chest feels a little full and a little twisted. 

He looks at Quinn, who is watching him anxiously. “Did I say it at the wrong time?” he asks and bites his lip. “You’re being really quiet.”

“No,” Max says, surprised to find his voice while his mind is still racing. “I think you were right, this time.”

“Oh good!” Quinn grins, bright and cheerful. “There was a not-insignificant chance you were going to punch me. It depends mostly on whether Brand has started training you yet.”

“Brand’s going to be training me?” 

He hasn’t suggested anything of the sort, yet. A glimmer of something close to excitement lights in Max’s chest. It’s an odd feeling. He’s still useless, now—but soon, if Quinn is right, which he isn’t always—he could be useful. He could _help_. 

He would have no reason to leave.

“Oops,” Quinn says, but his grin doesn’t fade. 

Max finds himself smiling back. Home, he thinks, could be _this_.

**Author's Note:**

> Quinn, in true Quinn fashion, never does what I want him to at _all_ , even when I'm supposedly the one writing him. I just wanted someone to, y'know, give Max some comfort and a hug but Quinn delivered, what, ice cubes and prophecies and hot chocolate? dude. 
> 
> also someone please remind Max that you don't have to be useful to be worth something! this boy I swear. 
> 
> please leave a comment to let me know what you thought! it means a lot <3


End file.
